Bridging the Valley Series:Exploring the Valley of Death in Hardware

Hello and welcome to Bridging the Valley, a series of articles recording a shared exploration of the potholes in the road of hardware technology development between lab research and implementation in human society.

Over the last 10+ years, Mike Lo has worked in hardware product development, with roles in engineering implementation, management, and program management for a very wide variety of products. During some of this time, he was responsible for researching emerging technologies to enable new features in future products. As he was doing this research, he noticed some really promising new technologies being shelved very early in their development for various reasons.

For example, there was one group of individuals working on a high precision tracking system that had applications for drones, AR/VR, and could even have a significant impact on saving lives by assisting search and rescue crews in a multitude of situations. They ended up having to pause development after running out of funding. This wasn’t a unique case. As I saw more examples of this over time, hestarted researching the phenomenon and found that this happens fairly often — newly developed technologies are proven in a lab setting, then end up sitting in a corner collecting dust. This occurrence is common enough that there’s a term for it: “the Valley of Death.”

In his news series “Bridging the Valley”, Mike takes us along with him in his research to better understand this phenomenon. Follow him on our blog.